I'm a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am. I have written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation. I've also ghosted pieces for several UK politicians in many of the UK papers, including the Daily Sport.

So What Has This Neoliberalism Ever Done For Us Eh? Not A Lot To Be Honest

George Monbiot, over in The Guardian, claims that the end result of the last 30 years experiment in neoliberalism has been “total failure”. Do be careful here, he doesn’t mean what an American might mean by neoliberalism: getting to traditionally liberal ends by the use of market mechanisms. Rather, he means the full on free market and capitalist ideas of Milton Friedman, Hayek and all the rest. You know, the sort of stuff that I’m always advocating. Free trade, globalisation, get the idiots governments out of the way, reduce interference in the economy, all that hateful right wing stuff. We’d even add in the Washington Consensus just to be controversial.

The policies that made the global monarchs so rich are the policies squeezing everyone else. This is not what the theory predicted. Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and their disciples – in a thousand business schools, the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD and just about every modern government – have argued that the less governments tax the rich, defend workers and redistribute wealth, the more prosperous everyone will be. Any attempt to reduce inequality would damage the efficiency of the market, impeding the rising tide that lifts all boats. The apostles have conducted a 30-year global experiment, and the results are now in. Total failure.

As you can imagine I don’t wholly agree with this statement of his. But let’s fight with one hand tied behind our backs shall we? Let’s just agree: OK, neoliberalism has done nothing at all for Americans or Brits. For any of the people in the rich countries in fact. We’re all living exactly the same lifestyles we were back in 1980 as Thatcher and Reagan started this whole thing off: you know, listening to Friedman’s siren songs and all that. Perhaps our physical living standards have gone up a bit, we’ve got the internet now, but we’re more unequal at the same time.

Well that’s interesting, isn’t it? While we’ve all been marking time this past decade, just a bubble with no real growth, then a financial collapse that revealed the bubble, there seems to have been some growth somewhere.

And as that growth hasn’t, as everyone insists it hasn’t been, in the rich countries, it must have been happening in the poor ones.

Which, as I recall from my youth back in 1980 or so was what everyone was saying needed to happen: the poor needed to get rich.

Or we can look at other figures. Perhaps the incidence of poverty? And this is real poverty, the $1 or $2 a day kind, not the I’m poor because next door has a larger car than I do kind of relative poverty.

Defining poverty as less than $1/day, world poverty rates fell by 80% from 27% in 1970 to slightly more than 5% in 2006.

The corresponding total number of poor fell from 403 million in 1970 to 152 million in 2006.

Similar findings apply if other poverty measures are used ($2/day, 5$/day, etc)

I have to say that (and yes, of course these numbers are after adjusting for inflation) that’s a pretty good outcome myself. Or this perhaps:

Please do note, that’s annual declines. The percentage reduction each year in the percentage of babes and innocents dying as a result of extreme poverty.

The data released by the World Bank’s Development Research Group show that 22% of the developing world’s population – or 1.29 billion people – lived on $1.25 or less a day in 2008, down from 43% in 1990 and 52% in 1981 (see top chart above).

As above, the precise numbers change from survey to survey. But absolutely no one at all doubts that huge reductions have been made in absolute poverty and destitution in recent decades.

And this is good too:

Note that that isn’t percentages. That’s actual numbers. Even as the population has risen over the decades the number of truly poor people has been falling.

BTW, I do not claim that poverty is finally beaten, I’d not say anything so dang stupid. But I would say that we seem to have found a way to get there. We’ve found a process that does indeed improve the lot of the global poor.

And as I remember it back in 1980 or so, the big socio-political question was, well, what are we going to do about the global poor? It’s clearly immoral that we’re living high on the hog and millions, hundreds of millions around the world are stuck in the Malthusian nightmare. Various plans were put forward too: all sorts of ideas about how global wealth has to be redistributed and so on.

And yet, here we are, 30 years later, and much of what we wanted to do back then is being done. The poor are getting rich. We’ve actually just seen in these past few decades the largest reduction in human poverty in the entire history of our species. And guess what?

Yes, it is a result of the economic policies we’ve been following over those decades. That Friedman and Hayek stuff, that Washington Consensus. Don’t do anything too stupid, keep governments out of the way, allow people to trade as they wish and try a bit of capitalism. On a global basis please.

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